Are You Safe?

Are You Safe?

Political Attention Deficit Disorder: A New Psychiatric Condition

by Joel S. Hirschhorn

According to a report not yet released, the Council on Science and Public Health of the American Medical Association has recommended that a chronic and widespread affliction of Americans be officially declared a psychiatric disorder. It has been named the Political Attention Deficit Disorder (PADD). It is recommended that the disorder be included in a widely used mental illness manual created and published by the American Psychiatric Association. The current manual was published in 1994; the next edition is to be completed in 2012. The benefit to people of an official classification is coverage by health insurance.

The symptoms of PADD are all around us and treating it professionally can do more for our country than any election, said Dr. Mable Wank in the reports introduction; she is chairwoman of the Council and a professor at UCLA.

Here are the Councils main findings on PADD:

Nearly 80 percent of adult American citizens are unable to pay sustained attention to issues and problems associated with their government. They are unable to accept their responsibility as citizens, including their obligation to vote, read in-depth articles and books on political issues, become active members of politically oriented groups, and initiate discussions on current events with friends and family. The decades-old decline in voter turnout is a direct result of a national epidemic of PADD, said the report.

The chief cause of PADD is the desire to avoid the very real pain of cognitive dissonance, the difference between what Americans want to believe about the greatness of their country and the disturbing reality that their government and country are in terrible shape, which is a constant reminder when there is normal, healthy political attention. Such pain suppression, however, is counterproductive and was found through careful studies at several universities, including the Harvard Medical College, to correlate with depression and anxiety disorders, as well as a heightened level of cynicism and despair. According to the report, many suicides and possibly many criminal acts result from PADD.

Another consequence of PADD is that people devote more of their time, energy and money to pleasure-seeking distractions. PADD is correlated with profound statistical significance to clinical symptoms such as obesity, alcoholism, drug addiction, video game addiction, Internet addiction, sexual promiscuity, excessive shopping, gambling addiction, and other harmful behaviors.

The report profiles a person severely afflicted by PADD. The psychiatrists unanimously concluded that George W. Bush is a PADD victim. Symptoms include no desire to pursue major and contentious policy issues through in-depth reading, discussion and analysis; a clear dependence on others for policy decisions, particularly Vice President Cheney; an inability to maintain sustained focus on diverse policy issues simultaneously; and an inability to articulate policy. The widespread public perception that Bush is unintelligent, uninformed and dogmatic stems from his PADD, concluded the Council. He needs immediate, emergency therapy for his PADD; that might help get us out of Iraq, said Dr. Wank.

Reached by phone, Dr. Aaron Gestaltstein, a Council member and psychiatrist with the Michigan Institute for the Study of Individual and Societal Health, said the AMA proposal will help raise awareness and called it the right thing to do if the United States is ever to regain effective government and equitable public policies. Sick Americans deserve compassionate treatment if our country is to survive  PADD is no joke, he added.

I saw a college-educated man last month who was so depressed about the Bush Administration  he could no longer read newspapers, watch cable news shows or visit news and commentary websites. He was spending virtually all of his non-work time visiting pornography websites and eating at Chinese buffets, Gestaltstein said. He is a terrible mess and swears he will never vote again.

The challenge for psychiatrists treating PADD patients, as noted in the Councils report, is to help Americans fully integrate political attention into their lives. Their discomfort and hopelessness must be changed into positive behaviors. Friends and relatives of PADD victims are urged to get them to join public interest groups working for the betterment of American government and society, such as Friends of the Article V Convention at www.foavc.org.

Joel S. Hirschhorn’s new book is Delusional Democracy www.delusionaldemocracy.com; he is a founder of Friends of the Article V Convention www.foavc.org.

Joel is a writer focusing on US politics, government, and culture. He was formerly a full professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, a senior staffer for the U.S. Congress (Office of Technology Assessment), head of an environmental consulting company, and Director of Environment, Energy and Natural Resources at the National Governors Association. His latest book is Delusional Democracy – Fixing the Republic Without Overthrowing the Government. He is a co-founder of Friends of the Article V Convention, its National Press Secretary, and writes regularly for many websites.

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Arts & Letters

Geonomics is …

a way to connect the dots. Making the cyber rounds is “The Cavernous Divide” by Scott Klinger, from AlterNet (posted March 21): “As the number of billionaires in the world expands, so does the number of those in poverty.” Duh. The yawning income gap is not news. Nearly every issue of our quarterly digest carries a similar quote. Yet the connection was worked out long ago by one of America’s greatest thinkers, Henry George, who labeled his masterpiece, Progress and Poverty. Techno- and socio-advances always enrich few and impoverish many. Yet progress also pushes up location values – the geonomic insight (is Silicon Valley cheaper now or more expensive?). Instead of taxing income, sales, or buildings, society could collect those values of sites, resources, EM spectrum, and ecosystem services via fees and dues, which would lower the income ceiling, and instead of lavishing corporate welfare, pay out the recovered revenue via dividends, which would jack up the income floor. Dots connected.

a way to have everybody pulling on the same end of the rope. Last summer’s expansive forest fires shed light on growing class resentment in the West. Old loggers and ranchers rankled at the new urgency to stamp out the blazes that threatened the recent Aspenesque settlers. The newcomers expected working class firemen to make protecting their expensive homes top priority. (Chr Sci Mntr, Spt 7) The tinder for this envy? Rich people moving in bid up the price of land, making it hard to afford by people on the margin. The fault really lies with our system of privatizing land value. If this rising value were collected by land dues and shared by rent dividends – the essence of geonomic policy – who’d complain? The more people move in, the higher the land value, and the fatter the dividend paid to residents. Then people on the margin might go out of their way to invite rich outsiders in.

the annoying habit of seeing the hand of land in almost all transactions. In geonomics we maintain the distinction between the items bearing exchange value that come into being via human effort — wealth — and those that don’t — land. Keeping this distinction in the forefront makes it obvious that speculating in land drives sprawl, that hoarding land retards Third World development, that borrowing to buy land plus buildings engorges banks, that much so-called “interest” is quasi-rent, that the cost of land inflates faster than the price of produced goods and services, that over half of corporate profit is from real estate (Urban Land Institute, 1999). Summing up these analyses, geonomists offer a Grand Unifying Theory, that the flow of rent pulls all other indicators in its wake. Geonomics differs from economics as chemistry from alchemy, as astronomy from astrology.

an alternative to conventional land trusts. Just as it seems some functions should not be left to the market – private courts and cops invite corruption (while private mediation is fine) – just so some land should not be left in the market. That said, sacred sites do not make much of a model for treating the vast acreage of land that we need to use. So the usual trust model, which is anti-use and counter-market, can not apply where it’s needed most. Trust proponents worry about ownership and control – two very human ambitions – but they’re not central. Supposedly, we the people own millions acres – acres that private corporations treat as private fiefdoms – and conversely, the Nature Conservancy owns wilderness the public can some places use as parks. So, the issue is not who owns but who gets the rent – ideally, all of us.

more transformation than reform; it’s a step ahead. Harvard economics students this year did petition to change the curriculum, in the wake of the English who caught the dissension from across The Channel. French reformers, who fault conventional economics for conjuring mathematical models of little empirical relevance and being closed to critical and reflective thought, reject this “autism” – or detachment from reality – and dub their offering “post-autistic economics”. Not a bad name, but again, academics define themselves by what they’re not, not by what they are, unlike geonomists. We track rent – the money we spend on the nature we use – and watch it pull all the other economic indicators in its wake. We see economies as part of the ecosystem, similarly following natural patterns and able to self-regulate more so than allowed, once we quit distorting prices. To align people and planet, we’d replace taxes and subsidies with recovering and sharing rents.

a scientific look at how we divvy up the work and the wealth, how some of us end up with too much or too little effort or reward. That’s partly due to Ricardo’s Law of Rent, showing how wasteful use of Earth cuts wages. And it’s partly due to how a society’s elite runs government around like water boys, dishing out subsidies and tax breaks. While geonomists look political reality right in the eye, without blinking, conventional economists flinch. When Paul Volcker, ex-chief of the Federal Reserve, moved on to a cushy professorship at Princeton cum book contract, the crush of deadlines bore down. So Volcker asked a junior associate to help with the book. The guy refused, explaining that giving serious consideration to policy would ruin his academic career. The ex-Fed chief couldn’t believe it and asked the department chair if truly that were the case. That head honcho pondered the question then replied no, not if he only does it once. And economics was AKA political economy!

an economic policy based on the earth’s natural patterns. Eco-systems self-regulate by using feedback loops to keep balance. Can economies do likewise? Why don’t they now produce efficiently and distribute fairly? The answers lie in the money we spend on the earth we use. To attain people/planet harmony, that financial flow from sites and resources must visit each of us. Our agent, government, must collect this natural rent via fees and disburse the collected revenue via dividends. And, it must forgo taxes on homes and earnings, and quit subsidies of either the needy or the greedy. As our steward, government must also collect Ecology Security Deposits, require Restoration Insurance, and auction off the occasional Emissions Permit. And that’s about it – were nature our model.

in part the Great Green Tax Shift maxed out. Economically, taxing pollution and depletion does reduce pollutants and extracts – and thus the tax base; plus such taxes are regressive, requiring a safety net. On the other hand, collecting site rent is progressive and generates a revenue surplus payable as a dividend to residents, which can serve as the safety net. Environmentally, taxes on waste and extraction do not drive efficient use of land, as does getting site rent.

more transformation than reform; it’s a step ahead. Harvard economics students this year did petition to change the curriculum, in the wake of the English who caught the dissension from across The Channel. French reformers, who fault conventional economics for conjuring mathematical models of little empirical relevance and being closed to critical and reflective thought, reject this “autism” – or detachment from reality – and dub their offering “post-autistic economics”. Not a bad name, but again, academics define themselves by what they’re not, not by what they are, unlike geonomists. We track rent – the money we spend on the nature we use – and watch it pull all the other economic indicators in its wake. We see economies as part and parcel of the ecosystem, similarly following natural patterns and able to self-regulate more so than allowed, once we quit distorting prices. To align people and planet, we’d replace taxes and subsidies with recovering and sharing rents.

a scientific look at how we divvy up the work and the wealth, how some of us end up with too much or too little effort or reward. That’s partly due to Ricardo’s Law of Rent, showing how wasteful use of Earth cuts wages. And it’s partly due to how a society’s elite runs government around like water boys, dishing out subsidies and tax breaks. While geonomists look political reality right in the eye, without blinking, conventional economists flinch. When Paul Volcker, ex-chief of the Federal Reserve, moved on to a cushy professorship at Princeton cum book contract, the crush of deadlines bore down. So Volcker asked a junior associate to help with the book. The guy refused, explaining that giving serious consideration to policy would ruin his academic career. The ex-Fed chief couldn’t believe it and asked the department chair if truly that were the case. That head honcho pondered the question then replied no, not if he only does it once. And economics was AKA political economy!